Katie Salen

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Informatics

Rules, a quintessential property of any and every game, are one of the factors that influence player experiences. Online multiplayer games have two dimensions of rules that can be leveraged to improve player experiences - game rules that developers work with at the game design level and server rules that the player community creates and maintains....

In this paper we searched the websites of 60 popular online multiplayer games to locate their codes of conduct and then performed a content analysis on 32 unique codes of conduct. Our analysis consisted of a two-cycle coding process including initial coding, and then pattern coding for clustering categories and themes together. Our aim was to bette...

Online settings have been suggested as viable sites for youth to develop social, emotional, and technical skills that can positively shape their behavior online. However, little work has been done to understand how online governance structures might support (or hinder) such learning. Using mixed-methods research, we report findings from a 2-year, i...

Technology plays an essential role in shaping youth’s communication and social interactions in online multiplayer games. Due to physical distancing restrictions during the COVID-19 global pandemic, online multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox are well-positioned to amplify healthy communication/social connections and mitigate the impact of so...

The world is becoming increasingly multilingual. In the U.S., despite rapid growth in linguistic diversity, there is a complete lack of multilingual language assessment tools and a severe shortage of multilingual clinicians to detect language impairments among children who speak minority languages. To develop accessible child language assessment to...

Online multiplayer games like Minecraft, gaining increasing popularity among present-day youth, include rich contexts for social interactions but are also rife with interpersonal conflict among players. Research shows that a variety of socio-technical mechanisms (e.g., server rules, chat filters, use of in-game controls to ban players, etc.) aim to...

Speech language pathologists (SLPs) work with children with diverse types of disabilities. Their clinical knowledge and experience using mobile technology can inform child–computer researchers novel design techniques to facilitate communication and learning for children with disabilities. This paper presents perspectives from an SLP through an over...

The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning - by K. Ann Renninger February 2019

This case study will delve into the organization and engagement models developed to bring game-like learning to the New York City public school sector. It will explore design’s capacity to transform artificial systems, in this case a public school operating within the context of the US Department of Education (DOE). The case explores the role playe...

Multiplayer online games, such as Minecraft, have the potential to be powerful sites for youth learning, but can be plagued by inter-personal conflicts. This brings the need for online moderation. However, only very little is known about the practices through which such moderation happens, or how socio-technical systems could be designed to enable...

Multiplayer online games, such as Minecraft, have the potential to be powerful sites for youth learning, but can be plagued by inter-personal conflicts. This brings the need for online moderation. However, only very little is known about the practices through which such moderation happens, or how socio-technical systems could be designed to enable...

All games contain conflict, and all good games have uncertain outcomes. Whether conflict over resources, knowledge, or territory, to name a few types, games challenge players to overcome obstacles in interesting and fun ways. Pokémon Go challenges players to find and capture Pokémon, which requires time, patience, skill, and the freedom to access t...

What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.” What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from game...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

Digital media are central in almost every aspect of daily life, most notably in how we communicate, understand political issues, reflect (co-)produce, consume, and share knowledge. Perhaps nowhere is this digital influence contested more than in education, where questions arise about the ability of traditional systems to prepare young people for th...

This report is a synthesis of ongoing research, design, and implementation of an approach to education called “connected learning.” It advocates for broadened access to learning that is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity. Connected learning is realized when a young person is able...

The first critical overview of an emerging field, with contributions from both scholars and artist-practitioners. Over the last decade, machinima—the use of computer game engines to create movies—has emerged as a vibrant area in digital culture. Machinima as a filmmaking tool grew from the bottom up, driven by enthusiasts who taught themselves to d...

The sixth volume of the DIGAREC Series holds the contributions to the DIGAREC Keynote-Lectures given at the University of Potsdam in the winter semester 2009/10. With contributions by Mark J.P. Wolf (Concordia University Wisconsin), Espen Aarseth (Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen), Katie Salen (Parsons New School of D...

The design for Quest to Learn, an innovative school in New York City that offers a “game-like” approach to learning. Quest to Learn, an innovative school for grades 6 to 12 in New York City, grew out of the idea that gaming and game design offer a promising new paradigm for curriculum and learning. The designers of Quest to Learn developed an appro...

This paper addresses a theoretical reconfiguration of experience, a repositioning of the techno-social within the domains of mobility, games, and play, and embodiment. The ideas aim to counter the notion that our experience with videogames (and digital media more generally), is largely “virtual” and disembodied – or at most exclusively audiovisual....

an Education Arcade paper (research report)

This interactive session presents early research findings resulting from a game simulation currently called Gamestar Mechanic through which 70 middle and high school-age players learn to design video games. Gamestar Mechanic is an RPG (Role-Playing Game) style online game through which players "take on" the behaviors characteristic of professional...

Educators and education advocates have recently acknowl- edged that the ability to think systemically is one of the nec- essary skills for success in the 21st century. Game-making is especially well-suited to encouraging meta-level refl ection on the skills and processes that designer-players use in building such systems. Membership in a community...

This paper describes Squidball, a new large-scale motion capture based game. It was tested on up to 4000 player audiences last summer at SIGGRAPH 2004. It required the construction of the world's largest motion capture space at the time, and many other challenges in technology, production, game play, and study of group behavior. Our aim was to ente...

Guía de referencia para el diseño conceptual de un videojuego, donde se ofrecen los marcos teóricos para construir el juego como un sistema de información que necesita administrar los datos estratégicamente para crear una experiencia de juego (historia, placer, simulación y sentido) en el usuario.

States that the transition from book to screen requires analytical comparison, and that the structure of the book cannot be translated to the screen without consideration of new spatial practices afforded by hypermedia "architexture." Discusses similarities between digital and printed documents and the implications for the digital document as a tex...

Suggests that visual signs help to define form and structure and are significant in their semantic function. Discusses a series of typographic studies that examine the relationship of designer, text and interpreter in the dialectical process of communication in which meaning is rendered and made explicit. (RS)

This paper describes a new large-scale motion capture based game that is called Squidball. It was tested on up to 4000 player audiences last summer at SIGGRAPH 2004. It required to build the world's largest motion capture space, the largest motion capture markers (balls), and many other challenges in technology, production, game play, and social st...